We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for August.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
3.
Ill Will
5 months
2.
2.
American War
5 months
3.
4.
Men Without Women: Stories
4 months
4.
7.
Exit West
2 months
5.
10.
The Idiot
2 months
6.
8.
What We Lose
2 months
7.
-
The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel
1 month
8.
-
The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
2 months
9.
-
Eileen
2 months
10.
-
The Changeling
1 month
Lots of action this month as our Hall of Fame absorbs three mainstays from the past six months: Lincoln in the Bardo, A Separation, and Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. This marks George Saunders's third entry into the Hall of Fame. He'd previously reached those hallowed halls for Tenth of December and Fox 8.
Meanwhile, The Nix dropped from our list after two months of solid showings. If he's reading this (because who isn't?) then hopefully Nathan Hill can look to two other titles on this month's list for solace. Both The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake as well as Otessa Moshfegh's Eileen are examples of books that have graced our monthly Top Ten one month (June, in this case) only to drop out for another (July), and then reappear (August). If they can do it, so you can you, Nix fans!
The remaining two spots were filled by new novels from Laurent Binet and Victor LaValle.
The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel, which was highlighted in bothinstallments of our Great 2017 Book Preview, was expected to provide "highbrow hijinks." In her review for our site this month, Shivani Radhakrishnan confirms that it delivers in this respect. Calling Binet's novel "a madcap sharply irreverent French theory mash-up that’s part mystery and part satire," Radhakrishnan goes on to contextualize it among other works in detective fiction and theory, which, she writes, have a good deal in common and which, she writes, intertwine to great effect here:
The new book turns Roland Barthes’s accidental death in 1980 into a murder investigation set against French intellectual life. With a cast of characters that includes Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva with guest appearances by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Umberto Eco, and John Searle, it’s no surprise Binet’s book is way more dizzying than most detective stories. What is shocking, though, is how it manages to respect the theories and mock the theorists all at once.
The Changeling, too, was highlighted on this site in one of our monthly mini-previews. At the time, Lydia Kiesling implored readers to check out LaValle's second novel, which she described as "a book that somehow manages to be a fairy tale, an agonizing parenting story, a wrenching metaphor for America’s foundational racist ills, and a gripping page-turner to usher in the summer." If you're still not sold, you can check out an excerpt from the book, or read our interview with the author from last year.
Skulking just beyond our list – like some expectant, lovelorn dolphin admiring a human home-wrecker as he swims – is Alissa Nutting's Made for Love, which I reviewed a month ago, and which I encourage you all to buy and read so that this sentence makes sense.
This month's other near misses included: The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, Hillbilly Elegy, Made for Love, Enigma Variations, and The Night Ocean. See Also: Last month's list.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for July.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Lincoln in the Bardo
6 months
2.
2.
A Separation
6 months
3.
3.
Ill Will
4 months
4.
4.
Men Without Women: Stories
3 months
5.
5.
American War
4 months
6.
6.
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
6 months
7.
-
Exit West
1 month
8.
-
What We Lose
1 month
9.
8.
The Nix
2 months
10.
-
The Idiot
1 month
Otessa Moshfegh learned Icarus's lesson this month. A few weeks ago, she boasted not one but two titles on our Top Ten list – a feat that had never before been accomplished. But come July? Nada. How quickly things change. One month, you're 1/5 of our list; the next month, one of your books has graduated to our Hall of Fame and another has dropped out of the running entirely.
Meanwhile, much of this month's list remains unchanged. The books in the first six positions didn't budge. Instead, three newcomers entered our ranks in the seventh, eighth, and tenth slots.
Mohsin Hamid's Exit West is one of those new books. "Tracing the fissures in human community and global space, and reflecting on the possibility of their transcendence," wrote Eli Jelly-Schapiro in his review for our site, the book "maps the divides that structure the current global order."
Next, in seventh position, we welcome What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons. In our recently published Great Second-Half 2017 Book Preview, our own Claire Cameron observed that "the buzz around this debut is more like a roar," and based on the book's immediate ascendance onto our list, that seems accurate.
Finally, Elif Batuman's The Idiot fills tenth position in this month's list. To that development, Millions staffers would likely say: about time. Having earned not one, but two full-length reviews for our site, The Idiot has been lauded for the way its "layered truths and fictions...compounded so that everything in the novel became true and real in a deep, shining way that cannot be achieved through essays." (It's also been examined in the context of sexual power dynamics.)
Next month, we can expect to see at least three openings on our Top Ten, and likely considerably more as the long tail of the Book Preview does its job.
This month's other near misses included: Hillbilly Elegy, The Night Ocean, Void Star, Dunkirk: The History Behind the Motion Picture, and Blind Spot. See Also: Last month's list.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for June.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
2.
Lincoln in the Bardo
5 months
2.
3.
A Separation
5 months
3.
4.
Ill Will
3 months
4.
8.
Men Without Women: Stories
2 months
5.
7.
American War
3 months
6.
5.
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
5 months
7.
9.
Homesick for Another World
6 months
8.
-
The Nix
1 month
9.
-
Eileen
1 month
10.
-
The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
1 month
One book dropped out, two ascended to our Hall of Fame, and that means three slots opened up for new titles on our June Top Ten. Before getting to the newcomers, congratulations are in order for The North Water author Ian McGuire, and especially for Derek B. Miller, whose Norwegian by Night dominated the Top Ten on the strength of Richard Russo's recommendation. Both authors are off to the Hall of Fame this month. At the same time, Zadie Smith's Swing Time has fallen off of the list after four months. Smith fans, fear not. In the past, authors have fallen off our list only to reappear later on, so it's possible for her to send her second book (after NW, which reached in 2013) to the Hall of Fame in due time.
Filling the new slots are three very different books following three very different trajectories.
The Nix by Nathan Hill finally joins the June Top Ten after hovering among the "Near Misses" since last December. At the time, our own Garth Risk Hallberg highlighted the book's "disparate concerns — video games, parental neglect, political anger" and praised the ways they're "bound together by the warmth, charm, and wit of the author’s voice." Nick Ripatrazone went further, invoking a lofty comparison in his teaser for our Great 2016 Book Preview:
Eccentricity, breadth, and length are three adjectives that often earn writers comparisons to Thomas Pynchon. Hill tackles politics more headlong than Pynchon in this well-timed release.
This is Hill's first time on one of our monthly lists.
Ottessa Moshfegh, meanwhile, is no stranger to them. Impressively, Eileen is the second Moshfegh book on this very month's Top Ten, after Homesick for Another World. It's Ottessa Moshfegh's world; we just live in it.
Finally, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake launched onto our list thanks to an insightful, moving, and comprehensive review from Mike Murphy. "Breece Pancake could see the future of America and it must have scared the hell out of him," Murphy writes of the late author, who took his own life in 1979, before this story collection was published posthumously.
This month's other near misses included: The Idiot, Exit West, Enigma Variations, Blind Spot, and The Night Ocean. See Also: Last month's list.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for May.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Norwegian by Night
6 months
2.
2.
Lincoln in the Bardo
4 months
3.
4.
A Separation
4 months
4.
7.
Ill Will
2 months
5.
5.
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
4 months
6.
6.
The North Water
6 months
7.
8.
American War
2 months
8.
-
Men Without Women: Stories
1 month
9.
9.
Homesick for Another World
5 months
10.
10.
Swing Time
4 months
April showers bring May flowers, but a month of May book purchases launched Michael Chabon's Moonglow into our Hall of Fame. It's the author's second appearance there; Telegraph Avenue made the list four years back.
Chabon's success freed up an opening on this month's Top Ten. Filling his place in 8th position is another author who's no stranger to our Hall of Fame: Haruki Murakami. In our Great 2017 Book Preview, Murakami's latest story collection, Men Without Women, was said to "concern the lives of men who, for one reason or another, find themselves alone." Emily St. John Mandel continued:
In “Scheherazade,” a man living in isolation receives regular visits from a woman who claims to remember a past life as a lamprey; in “Yesterday,” a university student finds himself drawn into the life of a strange coworker who insists that the student go on a date with his girlfriend.
Could this book become Murakami's third to make our Hall of Fame? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile Derek B. Miller's Norwegian by Night continues its reign over our list, further demonstrating that if you want to sell books to Millions readers, you ought to get an endorsement from Richard Russo first.
Elsewhere on the list, a few movers moved and shakers shook, but overall things held steady. Next month, we'll likely graduate two titles to our Hall of Fame, which means we'll welcome two more newcomers. By then, we'll be in full swing with our Great Second-Half 2017 Book Preview, which was a shocking thing to type. Can 2018 come soon enough?
This month's other near misses included: The Idiot, Eileen, The Nix, Exit West, and Enigma Variations. See Also: Last month's list.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for April.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Norwegian by Night
5 months
2.
2.
Lincoln in the Bardo
3 months
3.
4.
Moonglow
6 months
4.
5.
A Separation
3 months
5.
7.
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
3 months
6.
6.
The North Water
5 months
7.
-
Ill Will
1 month
8.
-
American War
1 month
9.
8.
Homesick for Another World
4 months
10.
10.
Swing Time
3 months
Spring has sprung but things are not what they seem. Here in Baltimore, watermen welcomed reports that the Chesapeake Bay crab population is the strongest its been in years, and yet simultaneously we got news that efforts to strengthen the Bay are on dire straits. Nationwide, things are not what they seem. Spring has sprung, and yet it snowed in Utah last weekend.
Appearances deceive. On our Top Ten list this month, Otessa Moshfegh's Homesick for Another World fell one spot -- perhaps because Brooks Sterritt disgusted y'all with his review for our site -- but at the same time, Moshfegh's earlier collection, Eileen, got a strong enough boost to make our list of near misses (at the bottom of this post). What is down is also up.
After six months of strong showings, we graduated two titles to The Millions's Hall of Fame: Tana French's The Trespasser and Ann Patchett's Commonwealth. Both have been there before: French six years ago for Faithful Place, and Patchett a year later for The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life.
Their spots on this month's list are filled by works from Dan Chaon and Omar El Akkad.
Chaon's novel, Ill Will, has been described by our own Edan Lepucki as being "about grief, about being unable to accept reality, and about the myriad ways we trick ourselves about our selves." In a wide-ranging conversation that ran on our site last month, the two discussed, among other things, Chaon's fascination with characters' names:
Names are weirdly important to me. ... I don’t know if it’s superstition or magic or what, but for me a name somehow breathes life into a puppet, gives shape to an abstraction. The characters often refuse to perform unless they have been properly christened.
Meanwhile El Akkad's debut, American War, "presents a highly plausible dystopia in the not so distant American future," according to Nicholas Cannariato:
El Akkad deploys a subtle critique of torture as not only immoral, but ineffective -- and a direct critique of the Bush administration’s embrace of torture and Donald Trump’s lurid flirtation with it.
Next month, we look forward to opening at least one new spot on the list. Which newcomer will come forth? Stay tuned to find out. (And enjoy the Spring as best you can!)
This month's other near misses included: Enigma Variations, Eileen, Here I Am, The Nix, and Version Control. See Also: Last month's list.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for March.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Norwegian by Night
4 months
2.
3.
Lincoln in the Bardo
2 months
3.
2.
The Trespasser
6 months
4.
4.
Moonglow
5 months
5.
8.
A Separation
2 months
6.
5.
The North Water
4 months
7.
6.
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
2 months
8.
10.
Homesick for Another World
3 months
9.
7.
Commonwealth
6 months
10.
-
Swing Time
2 months
News broke recently that Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad will be adapted for the screen by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, and it's hard to say what Whitehead's going to celebrate more: that wonderful development, or the fact that his novel, after a six-month run on our Top Ten list, has at last graduated to our site's hallowed Hall of Fame. Regardless, it can be said that good news seldom comes alone.
Filling the open spot on our list is Zadie Smith, whose latest novel, Swing Time, returns to our list after a three-month absence. (It first cracked the rankings in December.) At this pace, look for Smith, who's previously reached our Hall of Fame four years ago with NW, to send her second work there in March 2018.
Elsewhere on the list, several titles swapped positions, and George Saunders's Lincoln In the Bardo overtook Tana French's The Trespasser to claim second place. On our site this week, Millions staffer Jacob Lambert penned a simultaneously hysterical and haunting "modern" adaptation of Saunders's first novel, featuring a lumbering, slovenly beast by now familiar to us all:
Even in the gloom, his skin held an unhealthy rusty glow; his hair, if one might call it that, had an aspect of spun sugar, though it did not appetize.
Meanwhile, Manjula Martin's Scratch anthology - which chronicles the ways writers do and do not make money from their craft -- held fast in the middle of our list. Millions editor Lydia Kiesling caught up with Martin last week to discuss the way the book came to be, the struggles of trying to make a living from writing, and how writers, editors, and publishers alike feel about the same:
On the one hand I’m like yeah, people who do work should be paid. On the other hand…there is a way in which artistic value cannot be quantified. These two things can be true at the same time. But I think where things become far less ambivalent is when it comes to writing for publications and companies that make a lot of money off your work while you’re not making money off your work.
Skulking just beyond our Top Ten ranks this month are two particularly notable titles: Ill Will by Dan Chaon, who was recently interviewed by Edan Lepucki; and Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, which made it to the Championship Round of the Tournament of Books. Will either break into the rankings of our list next time? Well, there's only one way to find out.
This month's other near misses included: Here I Am, Version Control, and The Nix. See Also: Last month's list.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for February.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Norwegian by Night
3 months
2.
4.
The Trespasser
5 months
3.
-
Lincoln in the Bardo
1 month
4.
5.
Moonglow
4 months
5.
6.
The North Water
3 months
6.
-
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
1 month
7.
8.
Commonwealth
5 months
8.
-
A Separation
1 month
9.
4.
The Underground Railroad
6 months
10.
7.
Homesick for Another World
2 months
We sold so many copies of The Sellout over the past seven months that Paul Beatty's novel is now off to our Hall of Fame, and if current trends hold it looks like it'll soon by joined by Tana French's The Trespasser and Ann Patchett's Commonwealth. Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, too, has the Hall of Fame in its sights, although it'll need to hang on for one more month, and momentum is not on its side – it dropped five spots on our list this month.
Newcomers on this month's list include George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, Katie Kitamura's A Separation, and Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living edited by Manjula Martin. All three were previously featured on our Great 2017 Book Preview.
"Reading Lincoln in the Bardo is thus, itself, its own kind of bardo," wrote Louise McCune in her recent review for our site, which bound the novel – Saunders's first – to the Tibetan Buddhist concept of "something other than death."
It is an intermediate state. In Buddhist cosmology, it is most commonly understood as the period of transmigration, between death and new life, when the consciousness is waiting on the platform for the proverbial next train.
Scratch, meanwhile, concerns itself with something far more immediate: money, and the making of one's livelihood. The collection includes more than 30 essays, each focused on writers' precarious quests to earn income from their craft. Its appearance on our list was no doubt aided by "Ghost Stories," an excerpt from Sari Botton's contribution to the anthology, in which the author highlights some of her "most memorable deals from almost two decades in the [ghost writing] trenches."
For me, ghostwriting is a job — one I wouldn’t do if I didn’t need the money. Like any job, it has its pros and cons, its ups and downs — lots of freedom, the satisfaction of helping someone tell their story; but also, frequently, having to handle intense personalities with kid gloves.
Dropping out of this month's list were Jonathan Safran Foer's Here I Am, which was not exactly celebrated on our site (citation), as well as Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, which most certainly was (citations 1, 2, 3, and 4). Until next month, I'll leave it to y'all to sort that out.
This month's near misses included: The Nix, Swing Time, and Hillbilly Elegy. See Also: Last month's list.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for December.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
-
Norwegian by Night
1 month
2.
1.
The Sellout
5 months
3.
3.
The Trespasser
3 months
4.
4.
The Underground Railroad
4 months
5.
5.
Moonglow
2 months
6.
2.
Ninety-Nine Stories of God
6 months
7.
7.
Commonwealth
3 months
8.
8.
Here I Am
4 months
9.
-
The North Water
1 month
10.
-
Swing Time
1 month
Richard Russo wasn't kidding when he wrote in our Year in Reading series that the best novel he'd read this autumn was "a bit of a sleeper, though its fans are oh-so-passionate." For evidence of said passion, look no further than the top-spot debut for Derek B. Miller's Norwegian by Night on this month's list. Billed by Russo as "one of those books that completely transcends its genre," it focuses on a transplanted New Yorker suddenly on the run in Norway. "If you like those other Scandihoovian thriller writers," Russo wrote, "this is your book."
The rest of the December list remains largely unchanged from the one we saw in November, owing perhaps to the long tail of the aforementioned Year in Reading series, which will no doubt start influencing subsequent lists as early as next month. Meanwhile, we welcome two newcomers on the lower half of our list this month, which are likely to rise as the Year in Reading dust settles, and as holiday gift cards are spent.
In ninth position is Ian McGuire's The North Water, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and named by the New York Times's editors as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year. The novel is a thriller set on a nineteenth-century Arctic whaling ship with a killer aboard, which sounds to this Top Ten writer like a very distinct flavor of Hell.
Zadie Smith's Swing Time occupies the tenth spot. Smith's novel, her fifth, is complicated. As Kaila Philo noted in her review for our site, its protagonist "has no name, no signifiers, no grounding, only to be figured out through her relationships, interactions, and circumstances." She continues:
Our protagonist here is so nebulous she becomes an idea for the reader to grasp at and attempt to put together, like a puzzle made of stardust, but once the reader finishes the puzzle they’re left with a sparkling cloud reminiscent of nothing.
(Bonus: If you haven't yet, you should read the text of Smith's acceptance speech at the 2016 Welt Literature Prize.)
Lastly, Annie Proulx's Barkskins graduates to our Hall of Fame this month, becoming the 20th title to ascend to those hallowed ranks in the year of 2016. Here's to a new year!
This month's near misses included: The Nix, The Daily Henry James, and The Gene: An Intimate History. See Also: Last month's list.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for November.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
The Sellout
4 months
2.
2.
Ninety-Nine Stories of God
5 months
3.
3.
The Trespasser
2 months
4.
6.
The Underground Railroad
3 months
5.
-
Moonglow
1 month
6.
5.
Barkskins
6 months
7.
10.
Commonwealth
2 months
8.
8.
Here I Am
3 months
9.
7.
Pond
3 months
10.
9.
Innocents and Others
5 months
How fitting it is for Don DeLillo's Zero K to move on to our Millions Hall of Fame in this, the month of November, the time of no baseball and, thus, no Ks. (I will not apologize for this joke; No I Said No I Won't No.)
Speaking of baseball, others have pointed out the accuracy of Back to the Future II's foretelling of our current American predicament -- the Cubs winning the World Series; Biff Tannen ascending to a position of unimaginable power -- and so in that regard, it's fitting that an author who got his start around the time that movie came out would grace our latest Top Ten. Michael Chabon, of course, requires no introduction, and least of all from someone who'd build a strained Back to the Future II reference upon the foundation of a corny baseball joke. Nevertheless here we are.
Moonglow, is a welcome addition to this month's list. In her preview for our site last summer, Tess Malone wrote:
We’ve all had that relative who spills their secrets on their deathbed, yet most of us don’t think to write them down. Chabon was 26 years old, already author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, when he went to see his grandfather for the last time only to hear the dying man reveal buried family stories. Twenty-six years later and the Pulitzer Prize winner’s eighth novel is inspired by his grandfather’s revelations. A nearly 500-page epic, Moonglow explores the war, sex, and technology of mid-century America in all its glory and folly. It’s simultaneously Chabon’s most imaginative and personal work to date.
A few weeks ago, Chabon expanded on this balancing act between novel and memoir in an interview for our site:
[Some people have claimed] that memoirs are more appropriate to the time we live in, but also superior to fiction. Listening to that kind of talk and seeing situations like the James Frey incident…The thing that made everyone upset was the fact that he had lied, you know? That he passed this thing off as true when it was a work of fiction was wrong. What pissed me off as a novelist was that he wrote it as a novel and nobody wanted to publish it. Then he relabeled it as a memoir and suddenly everybody wants to publish it and everyone wants to read it.
That offends me because I’m a novelist and writing novels is what I do. I take that personally on some levels. It also offends me because it’s bullshit. Memoirs are bullshit to some degree. I don’t mean memoirists are liars; some might be, most are not. I know memoirists try to be scrupulous and try not to deviate from what they remember. It’s the last few words of my sentence where the bullshit comes in. Of course what you remember is a lie or a distortion. It’s inaccurate, there’s conflation, there’s elision. There are gaps, there maybe things that you’ve deliberately forgotten and then forgotten that you’ve forgotten so that you sincerely think they didn’t happen.
Elsewhere on the list, a few titles jostled around, but nothing dropped out altogether. Stay tuned for next month's list, which will likely be influenced by our ongoing Year in Reading series.
This month's near misses included: The Daily Henry James, The Nest, Heroes of the Frontier, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, and The Girls. See Also: Last month's list.

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for October.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
3.
The Sellout
3 months
2.
4.
Ninety-Nine Stories of God
4 months
3.
-
The Trespasser
1 month
4.
5.
Zero K
6 months
5.
6.
Barkskins
5 months
6.
7.
The Underground Railroad
2 months
7.
10.
Pond
2 months
8.
9.
Here I Am
2 months
9.
8.
Innocents and Others
4 months
10.
-
Commonwealth
1 month
How to rule The Millions's monthly Top Ten list:
Write and publish a great book.
Have the book's protagonist's voice praised for being "as appealing, erudite, and entertaining as any since Alexander Portnoy’s."
Win the Man Booker Prize.
Congratulations, Paul Beatty, you've done hit the trifecta!
We also welcome two newcomers to our list this month: Tana French's The Trespasser and Ann Patchett's Commonwealth, both of which had previously been featured on our Most Anticipated list.
French's novel, the sixth in her Dublin Murder Squad series, focuses on the murder of a young woman ostensibly preparing for a date. Around here at The Millions, it's tough to pick a resident Tana French expert - both Janet Potter and Edan Lepucki hold legitimate claims to that title -- so site readers interested in a taste of French's work should start by reading the author's recent interview for our site, focusing on her penchant for using police interrogations as literary devices; Lepucki's piece on French's plotting; a conversation between both Edan and Janet about French's writing; and the author in her own words recounting her Year in Reading.
Patchett's work, too, is familiar to Millions staffers and readers alike. In her blurb for our Most Anticipated list, Lepucki wrote of Commonwealth:
A new novel by the bestselling author of gems like Bel Canto and State of Wonder is certainly a noteworthy publishing event. This time, Patchett, who also owns Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tenn., takes on a more personal subject, mapping multiple generations of a family broken up by divorce and patched together, in new forms, by remarriage. Commonwealth begins in the 1960s, in California, and moves to Virginia and beyond, spanning many decades.
Meanwhile, this month we graduate two Top Ten mainstays to our Hall of Fame: Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer and Samantha Hunt's Mr. Splitfoot. Fare thee well in Valhalla!
This month's near misses included: The Girls, Heroes of the Frontier, Signs Preceding the End of the World, The Nest, and The Unseen World. See Also: Last month's list.